How Gardening With Your Kids Helps Them Grow Up Healthier

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Looking for a fun activity that you can do with your kids that helps them learn, live healthier, and that’s close to home? It sounds like a tall order, but the answer is simple: gardening.

From an early age, gardening has huge developmental benefits for your kids and it might just become a life-long passion. If you’ve got a green thumb yourself, you don’t need to struggle to find time to get back to your garden. Teach your kids how to grow plants, vegetables, and flowers themselves. Besides, is there anything kids love more than getting their hands dirty and clothes fresh out of the laundry covered in mud? At least they can learn something while they do it.

Besides the fun, gardening with your children has tons of benefits to their early development.

#1 Healthy Eating

First things first, gardening vegetables is all about healthy eating. With your own vegetable garden, you have access to organic, delicious vegetables whenever they’re ripe.

Vary your vegetables so that there’s always something fresh ready to be picked. If you can’t get your kids to eat broccoli, see how they react when they’re responsible for growing their food themselves.

#2 Hands-On Experience

At an early age, kids need to be exposed to multiple kinds of learning. In school, they’ll be exposed to logical, verbal, visual, and aural types of learning, but not so much physical or kinesthetic learning.

Hands-on gardening engages all of their senses and they’ll learn how to problem solve using their hands. The hands-on experience also helps develop the fine motor skills of young children.

#3 Learning About Science

Gardening isn’t just an art, it’s all about science. It’s the perfect introduction to biology and botany.

At this stage of curiosity with the world, kids are keen to learn why things happen. Why does a plant get taller when you feed it water? Why do flowers open up all of the sudden? Share your knowledge about the plants and vegetables you love to grow already.

#4 Responsibility

Try this: once they’ve learned some of the basics from you, give your kids their own seeds and pots that are theirs to care for. They’ll learn that you have to take care of seedlings every day, or they’re not going to thrive.

#5 Patience

Patience is a virtue that’s hard to come by when you’re a kid. Everything has to be now, now, now. Gardening will teach them that good things come to those who wait, including watching their plants and flowers grow.

Gardening is a fun and educational activity you can participate in every day, close to your home. If you own a greenhouse, it’s also an activity that you can do rain or shine, even in the winter.

Share your passion for fresh vegetables and beautiful flowers with your kids from a young age. Give your kids a chance to learn with their hands, learn about healthy eating, get a hands-on introduction to science, and learn about patience and responsibility.

One of my fondest memories of my mother was her love of gardening. I remember pretending I was a scavenger and living off the land, I would take fruits and vegetables from the garden to “survive”. Got to love kid’s imaginations!

1/7/18 Happy almost Monday! Okay, not really. No one likes Mondays but I am looking forward to being able to call the doctor for my grandfather. He’s been under the weather and needs to make an appointment ASAP.

Krystle Cook – the creator of Home Jobs by MOM – put her psychology degree on a shelf and dived into a pile of diapers and dishes instead. She is a wife and mother to two rambunctious boys, sweating it out in her Texas hometown. She loves cooking, DIY home projects, and family fun activities.

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